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The Guardian (UK): ‘Final piece in the jigsaw’

Tuesday October 31, 2006

Scientists

“This should be a turning point in a debate which has pitted short term economic interests against long-term costs to the environment, society and the economy”.
Martin Rees, president, Royal Society

“The review closes a chasm that has existed for 15 years between the precautionary concerns of scientists and the cost-benefit views of many economists. It finds most economists’ methods have been inadequate for a problem of this scale”
Michael Grubb, Imperial College

“The time for procrastination is over. Pay today and it might take your savings, pay tomorrow and it will take your shirt”
Dave Reay, Natural Environment Research Council
“It provides the vital missing link between global economics and the emerging and overwhelming evidence of human influence on climate change”
Dr Chris Huntingford, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology

NGOs

“We always knew the scientific and moral case for action was overwhelming, but this report is the final piece in the jigsaw. There are no more excuses left, no more smokescreens to hide behind”
Charlie Kronick, Greenpeace

“Poor communities and nations are the worst hit by climate change … Without a strong focus on aiding ordinary people’s struggle to adapt to new conditions, we can kiss goodbye our goal of reducing world poverty”
Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development

“It turns the conventional attitude to the economics of climate change on its head. For too many years industry lobbyists have claimed that action was not affordable, but this proves this is not the case. The good news is that we have the economic and technological ability to avert catastrophe”
Tony Juniper, director, Friends of the Earth

“Global average temperatures must not rise by more than 2C. This means committing to the toughest end of Sir Nick Stern’s range of targets. Anything less and we will be entering dangerous and uncharted waters”
Paul King, WWF

“It changes the terms of the debate on climate change and removes the last refuge of the ‘do-nothing’ approach on climate change, particularly in the US. Those who deny climate change have been smoked out”
Simon Retallack, Institute for Public Policy Research

Business

“A low-carbon future has the potential to deliver a range of economic benefits to companies and countries that take the lead in tackling climate change”
James Smith, chairman of Shell UK, for the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change

“It shows that immediate action against climate change could boost the economy. The government urgently needs to use this opportunity to develop a green manufacturing strategy”
Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary

Contrarians

“Not since Nostradamus … has a publishing event had the anticipated impact of today’s report. The great satirist Jonathan Swift mocked scientists by inventing a scheme by which they made sunbeams out of cucumbers. Making money out of the air, on the back of a scientifically unproven panic, would surely defy even the powers of a Swift to invent a more preposterous fiction”
Melanie Philips, Daily Mail

“Highway robbery practiced by armies of obnoxious, intrusive, money-grabbing bureaucrats dressed in green suits will make millions see red, not green, and induce resistance”
Michael Martin-Smith, CCNet

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1935711,00.html

 

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